Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched The Simpsons’ latest “Treehouse of Horror” on Fox or via Hulu subscription, so be warned!
Give me all the spooky decorations, slasher movie marathons and fun-sized candy sales, but it doesn’t truly feel like Halloween until The Simpsons delivers its annual “Treehouse of Horror” episode. (Let’s no one speak the dark ages of November airdates.) Hitting the 2025 TV schedule is the 36th anthologized installment, which means there have been — let’s see, with three segments per, you carry the one, and….[hammering and sawing noises, dogs barking] — more than 100 movie spoofs, TV parodies, morality tales and the like have been crafted.
The three segments in “Treehouse of Horror XXXVI” (along with Matt Groening’s meme-friendly T-shirt in the opening) are all fun and highly watchable. it’s one of those episodes where segments play out in a proper viewing order on the spectrum from “the silliest shit” down to “a panic-inducing dose of reality.” In this case, the opener delivers a stomach-churning, Jaws-esque take on America’s fried food obsession,which perhaps is meant to be the small-picture reflection of the third segment’s doomsaying. In any case, let’s share this bigass bucket of triple-fried mozzarella logs while praising the other segments.
“Live” Krusty Specials Should Be A Yearly Ritual, With And Without The Horror
“Clown Night with the Devil“ brilliantly mashes up the sleazy charm of Krusty the Clown’s TV past with the genre-stylized flair of Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ buzzy 2023 hit Late Night with the Devil, with sprinkles of Jordan Peele’s Nope and decades of children’s entertainment staples thrown in for flavor. It’s essentially a Halloween special that goes haywire when the Dark Lord himself rises up and wreaks havoc on live TV, with Idris Elba providing ze Devil’s voice. Michael Keaton and Ike Barinholz also guest in this segment, and everyone sounds like they were having some fun.
The color/B&W aesthetic changes and other specific tropes make me very hopeful that the creative team had so much fun putting this segment together that they’ll pitch another “live” Krusty special for a future season, and that the entire episode will take that approach, as opposed to just slotting it into another themed anthology. I would absolutely also be down to watch a follow-up full-length Halloween special to be coupled with a “Treehouse” episode.
The show broke that mold already with the joke-filled IT parody in 2022, and repeated it in 2024, so it’s not outside the realm of reality the way that a clown’s 50-year TV career would be. But while I’d love to see more of Krusty’s celeb-filled shindigs, an installment like “Plastic World” is a nightmare I wish wasn’t such so already prevalent.
“Plastic World” Isn’t Really Horror, But It’s Terrifying All The Same
When The Simpsons really digs in with a passionate argument about something, it can be as effective as anything of a higher brow, and “Plastic World” takes aim at the rapidly expanding amount of disposable (but not biodegradable) plastic comprising possibly irreversible changes in the planet’s waters and land. How? By setting the story at a point when the Earth’s crust has been covered by additional layers of Halloween jack’o’lantern buckets, Buzz cola bottles, fast food kids’ meal toys, and the refuse from myriad other one-use products. (So many ball pit balls.)
Sure, it’s the most heavy-handed way to present such an idea, but it’s the kind of exaggerated storytelling where you know there’s a ticking clock on how long until it goes from hyperbole to reality. Lisa’s group meets within space enclused by a circle made out of many hundreds of car batteries, and it’s harder for me to believe that they would all stack up so well than it is to think that there are hundreds of thousands of discarded batteries that could make sure a fortified barrier. Milhouse joking about digging through a layer of “little yellow ducks” is frighteningly on point, because why are there so many of them?
The segment is also Mad Max-adjacent, which brings about some of the gorier moments as Bart’s crew attempts to take all the resources for themselves. Also not really horror, but also likely not far from whatever reality would come out of this situation, which is the TRUE horror, amirite?
Of course, this 8-minute segment couldn’t truly dig into the harrowing struggle that would come with living in this world, and instead goes for a wackier resolution where Homer and Marge turn into mutated plasticized versions of themselves, along with many other characters, and it all ends in the utopia/dystopia of a world populated by plastic Maggie clones. Definitely a fun visual element that hearkens back to “Homer3” and other episodes highlighting animation advancements.
I really, really hope this isn’t a future example of The Simpsons predicting things, and it’s that potential outcome that will poke at the back of my mind with a foam finger. But that’s only for this segment. I’m perfectly fine with any predictions about PBS celebrities rising from their graves.